How to Maximise CX with the latest AI Developments

How many of us look at the incredible technology developments we’re seeing right now with AI and instinctively know these advances can help us in our business lives?
Take a deep dive into how you can move beyond the hype and use AI to maximise customer experience and engagement.

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Today's CX Landscape

The Engagement Capacity Gap

At Verint we hear a lot of CX and contact centre concerns from our varied customers – generally speaking, organisations across the board are in a tough place, facing:

The need to accommodate the increasing number of interactions and channels, as well as the increasing expectations of their customers.
The pressure to connect silos and processes across the organisation to deliver smooth customer engagement, meaning they need to provide the right tools and automation for the workforce.

But they don’t have unlimited resources. In fact, their resources tend to remain flat or even decrease.

So when it comes to creating enduring customer relationships, there’s a gap between what organisations need to do and the resources they have available to actually do it. We call this “the Engagement Capacity Gap.”

This is a problem that will get worse over time – and it impacts both the customer and employee experience.

Broader than just Measuring CX

Keen to close this Engagement Capacity Gap? To start, you need to look at how you are delivering great customer experiences, and this needs to be far broader than just measuring the CX feedback you receive.

It means looking at how you are delivering across the whole of the customer engagement lifecycle:

This begins right from the start, before the engagement, with how you forecast and schedule to have the right staffing to meet customer demand
It also means looking at the choice of channels you offer to customers and the ability for customers to self serve across all of these, whether calls, chat, WhatsApp or social
And when the agent is engaged with the customer, it’s the information, knowledge and guidance available to the agent to serve the customer as well as possible
And finally, after the interaction, it’s how you measure the quality and compliance of the interaction, the insight you derive from the interaction, and how you apply that to ingoing improvement

Evaluate The Whole Customer Engagement

You need to be gathering data throughout customer engagement and using this to evaluate performance, as no one item in isolation is sufficient.

For instance, if I look at my company’s CX data alone, I may see a variance in our CX feedback and some weak CX scores occurring, but it’s only when I combine this CX data with the forecasting and scheduling data that I can get the full insight. From this I might learn that most of the weaker CX scores are happening when agents get into the last hour of their shift, suggesting that we need to review shift and break patterns to get to the root cause of the issue.

At Verint, we believe that delivering great customer experience needs to consider the whole customer engagement. The next question is – how do we unleash the business potential of the many generative AI and LLM engines becoming available to help us?

Investment into AI

There has been massive attention on AI over the last year. This has been primarily due to ChatGPT, but others are coming out fast too. Massive sums of investment being poured into this area and as well as OpenAI, we have seen Bard, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Meta and X.AI all making significant announcements on AI developments.

But things haven’t always gone smoothly, and these issues range from the amusing to the very serious.

These issues fuel concerns and we are now seeing the EU AI Act, the world’s first regulation on artificial intelligence, setting out some great principles: AI should be safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly, and overseen by people, rather than by automation, to prevent harmful outcomes.

How Can Brands Maximize Value with Latest AI?

Embrace AI to Infuse Innovation into Business Workflows Resulting in Better Automation and Elevated CX

We have 3 key principles that we believe are extremely important and need to be followed to move beyond interest level in AI engines and really deliver successful AI projects:

Open AI Platform – enabling us to take advantage of the latest innovation
Trained on Relevant Data – not just generically looking at all information published on the internet
Embedded in business workflows – rather than just discrete AI engines, which although very clever, aren’t particularly useful in isolation

AI engines are as good as the data they are built upon

We need models to be trained on customer engagement data, not just generic web published information. For this reason, we use:

Millions of Digital Behaviour Points
Millions of Intelligent virtual Assistants sessions
Millions of unstructured comments and survey responses looking at CX data, and…
Billions of calls

We also believe that you need an open foundation able to take advantage of proprietary models but also to adopt rapid development of commercially available models. And that is what we see here: we use a mix of Verint developed proprietary AI models for assessing quality automatically, ensuring forecast accuracy, and enabling cognitive search in our Knowledge Management application.

We also use a mix of commercially available models such as using OpenAI for summarising interactions, redaction performed by Microsoft Cognitive Services and Amazon Macie, and the Meta Prophet model as one of our forecasting models.

Delivering AI in Business Workflows

One principle that is absolutely key to driving success is to deliver AI capabilities as part of your business workflows rather than as discrete AI engines.
It’s important to deliver these AI powered, business-driven workflows throughout the customer engagement journey, both in terms of your customer activity and the tasks being carried out within your organisation.
This spans the full lifecycle:

How and when you hire people
Forecasting demand and scheduling resources
Handling customer interactions
The analytics available to review how you performed from a quality and compliance perspective (as well as reviewing customer demand drivers to manage future engagements)

Our approach to infusing AI into business workflows takes our expertly-built team of AI powered bots to assist the workforce. Each bot is dedicated to a specific task and focused on delivering that task brilliantly, based on bringing AI capabilities to the workflow.

Augment your workforce with specialised AI Bots

Picture this: a team of bots working with your team to free up agent time so they can focus on building customer relationships and upselling.
A team of specialised AI Bots, all with their own capabilities, can help augment your workforce. Examples of agent augmentation include:

Containment Bot – this will work to handle the customer within self services across any channel: voice, chat, email, social and WhatsApp
Transfer Bot – summarises the conversation so far (whether with a bot or another agent) making it easy for the receiving agent to quickly review history
Wrap-up Bot – summarises the conversation, but this time at the end of an agent interaction for review before dropping into a CRM application as the agent conversation notes
R/T Knowledge Bot – looking at the intent of the conversation, this bot’s goal is delivering appropriate knowledge management article

Each of these bots augment agent activity – and each has a positive impact on customer experience and engagement.

Utilise Bots to Assist CX Across the Entire Enterprise

This isn’t just about how we help agents do their jobs, however. We also see capabilities for supporting functions beyond agents, such as:

Bots to help performance and quality scoring based on the profile of the ideal customer experience helping supervisors and managers their day to day activity
The Knowledge Authoring Bot will take corporate content and generate knowledge articles that contain a digestible version of this content that can be used by agents or self-service customers

Our team of experts are here to talk through and explore your CX aspirations. Book a 25min discovery call where they will listen to where you are right now in your CX journey and where you would like to be, then give expert advice on next practical steps.

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